Volts podcast: Kimberly Nicholas on the best ways to get cars out of cities

In this episode, Kimberly Nicholas discusses her published research on the most effective policies to reduce car use in cities.

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David Roberts

In the US, the movement to get cars out of cities is … what’s the nice word? … nascent. But in Europe, where many cities were built before cars and big-box sprawl never completely dominated, there is growing agreement that cars need to be reigned in. It’s partly about fighting climate change, but beyond that it’s about quality of life — living without air and noise pollution, using your legs to get around, and enjoying public spaces.

More and more European cities are discovering what Copenhagen found when it studied the problem in earnest: every mile traveled on a bike adds value to a city, whereas every mile traveled in a car subtracts value.

The pushback against cars in the Europe has been going on for decades now, but there has been little effort to catalogue and rank the various policies and initiatives involved. What works and what doesn’t? What should other cities prioritize?

Into that breach came a recent research paper in Case Studies on Transport Policy that dove into the academic literature (surveying 800 papers) to rank the top car-reducing strategies. It was co-authored by Paula Kuss (based on her master’s research) and Kimberly Nicholas of Sweden’s Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies. Nicholas later wrote a summary of the research for The Conversation that received an enormous amount of attention.

As it happens, driving cars out of cities is one of my enduring obsessions, so I eagerly accepted Nicholas’ offer to review the research, discuss the themes evident in the top-performing policies, and ponder whether such policies could ever take hold in the US. Our conversation was enlightening and heartening, despite making me want to move to Europe.

With no further ado, Kim Nicholas. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.

Kimberly Nicholas

Thank you so much. Long-time listener, first-time guest.

David Roberts

I want to talk about your study, but before we jump in, there's just a couple of kind of background things I want to establish. One point, which you emphasize a couple of times, which I don't feel like is super well understood. I feel like a lot of times, in my experience, when we talk about declining cars, or trying to get rid of cars, or blocking cars, or anything that inhibits cars, it strikes people, I think, intuitively as a punishment to the poor. And the point you make, at the top of your post about your paper, is that this is not in fact, the case.

In fact, the sort of transportation sector is weighted as it is toward the wealthier. So say just a little bit about that by way of background.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yeah, I think that's so important that people understand that it is overwhelmingly the rich who drive the most, and it's very important to design climate and transport policies that simultaneously tackle the very serious and increasing problem of inequality. But that's fully possible to do. Some of the people who benefit the most from active and public transport are lower-income folks. So our study focused on Europe because Europe actually has a policy to ...

David Roberts

Study.

Kimberly Nicholas

Exactly. The European Union has promised to deliver 100 climate-neutral cities by 2030. And those cities have just been chosen. And in order for that to actually happen, cities have to reduce the number of cars.

And when we look in Europe, the data show that it's the rich who drive the most, the richest 10%, about 21% of their emissions comes from driving. And they take up so much more space in cities, which is something we often don't think about. But in Berlin, for example, it's three and a half times more public space that goes to car drivers than non-car drivers. So the car really is a tool to increase inequality.

David Roberts

And that's just parking mostly, right? That public space?

Kimberly Nicholas

Largely parking. Also roads and other car infrastructure. In Sweden, it's about 100 m², roughly 1000 square feet. That's the size of many apartments in cities, here. So you think, "Okay, what value could we get for that land? That could be public parks, that could be more housing where we need it in cities." And it's just a really inefficient use of space.

David Roberts

And you make the point that EU is doing fairly well on some climate metrics, but its transportation sector is actually kind of a little bit of its Achilles' heel. It's not on a good trajectory.

Kimberly Nicholas

No. And I think that this is really something that it's important for the world to take a look at because to get down to zero emissions and actually stop climate change, the first thing is to produce a lot of clean energy. And I think listeners to your podcast are well aware of that, and you talk about that a lot. But then you have to electrify everything to run on that clean energy. And transport is the next sort of phase. And you see in some of the earlier leaders at the national level, Sweden is one of them, where emissions have been declining too slowly, but they are on the way down.

California is a state in the US that's the same, where they're making the transition to produce clean energy, but they're not yet, or they're just really starting to gain traction in electrifying cars to run on that clean energy. And they're not tackling the need to reduce cars and switch to the need for less mobility and sustainable mobility.

David Roberts

What is that case? Because I think a lot of people, a lot of people, especially new to this area, sort of think, "Well, transportation runs on gas, switch it over to run on clean electricity, and you're good." I think that lots of people think that's most of the solution, and I think a lot of people also think that that's faster to do that than to change cities. So what's the case for trying to reduce overall vehicle miles traveled alongside electrification?

Kimberly Nicholas

Well, the climate case is that we won't meet climate goals unless we do that, and the inequality case is that we'll continue to exacerbate inequality unless we do that. So I think that's a very strong case because if we're serious about these goals, and actually making cities safer and healthier and more fair and nice places to live, we actually need to focus on reducing cars. And a lot of cities are starting to realize that, especially in Europe, but also elsewhere. I mean the US does have a lot of work and activism and research showing the need to actually reduce cars.

And I think the IPCC, the UN Climate Panel, has started to pick this up, and their latest report focused on this "avoid-shift-improve" model, which I think is really helpful because, for a long time, climate policy has really been focused on just the improve. Take unsustainable tech, replace it with sustainable tech, done. And on a finite planet that's not enough. Because not only do we have a carbon budget, which we need to meet to stay within Paris Agreement limits of warming, we just have a material world that is limited. We have a limited amount of land and water and resources, and we have to use less of them than many of us in wealthy countries do right now in order for everybody to have enough.

David Roberts

And a lot of new drivers on the way, in the next few decades. Or at least a lot of people who will newly have enough money to drive, if that's the option.

Kimberly Nicholas

I had a really interesting conversation, actually, on Twitter. Someone from Ghana got in touch with me and was talking about what sustainable mobility looks like there. And I mean, the reality there is that the vast majority of transportation at the moment is on foot. And his argument was that this kind of approach to reduce cars can actually really benefit people in cities in Subsaharan Africa, for example, that are growing fast, that have a lot of transport needs, that are choked by car traffic, and aren't designed and aren't meeting the needs of how people actually get around.

And those cities have an opportunity to do things right from the beginning rather than do what actually Copenhagen did, which was be designed for cars, and then due to grassroots organizing, kind of re-engineer itself to be a city for people instead of cars. But that's obviously a fight and more expensive and takes more time, than doing it right from the beginning.

David Roberts

Yeah, they could leapfrog cars in the jargon. Let's talk about your study then. So you looked across the EU at cities that are trying to reduce vehicle travel and looked at their policies, and tried to sort of compare them and figure out which are the most efficacious. And so my sort of first question is it just seems like, intuitively, that's a lot of very different circumstances, a lot of very different policies, a lot of different areas or sectors. They cover just there's so many apples and oranges. How did you find some sort of data set where you could compare across these?

Kimberly Nicholas

It was a struggle. Thank you for recognizing that. As we write for academics and the people doing the research that formed the evidence base for this study, which was led by Paula Kuss for her master's thesis, please use a standard metric and one that can actually be linked to emissions. So if any of you listening are in a position to measure car use, please measure vehicle miles traveled by modal share per day. So how far do people go and what means of transport do they use to travel that distance? Because as you saw, we had to combine different measures, and then make somewhat subjective assessment of "okay, how do we rank these?"

We can say, "drop in car use by commuters," or "drop in the number of cars in the city center," or "drop in the share of residents who have a car," and make some kind of informed guess about, "well, how many people or what percent does this apply to?" But it's not as good as if we could say miles traveled, but nobody measured that in our study. We screened more than 800 papers.

David Roberts

Really? Zero cities are keeping track of that metric?

Kimberly Nicholas

They may well be doing it, but it's not ending up in the peer-reviewed literature. And we also checked about half of our database came from reports at the city level. So, I mean, it may well be in PDFs at individual cities, but that weren't part of the European Union databases that we looked at for inclusion. So the data may be out there if you're willing to dig on an individual level. And I guess now that we've identified here are these couple of dozen cities where you should be looking, it might be more feasible to go into their city council websites and so on. But I think that's just prohibitive as a place to start a research project.

David Roberts

There's an element of subjectivity here that we think it's directionally correct. So I don't want to go through the whole list since there are quite a few different policies here. But let's talk about the top three, then. Let's go through the top three, what they are, and how effective they are and where, and who's using them.

Kimberly Nicholas

Sure. So leading the list at the top is a "congestion charge". So London was the first to implement this. Drivers need to pay to enter the city center. And that was, we found the most effective overall.

David Roberts

Is that spread beyond yet London? I know New York City has beat its head against that wall for quite a while, but has not done it yet, right? Has any other city done it?

Kimberly Nicholas

So we only looked in Europe, and in Europe, we found Milan, Stockholm and, Gothenburg are all using a congestion charge as well. London's was the most effective. So city center car traffic in London dropped 33%, which is quite a lot.

David Roberts

Wow.

Kimberly Nicholas

Other cities were not as much. The approach that we took doesn't really let us dive into the details. I think you would need to add some social science research to interview people who were involved and understand, you know, the design and the actors and the coalitions at play. And, you know, why, why exactly did it get this result on the ground?

But even the ones that didn't see as big of a result, the fact that it's for the entire center city, of 12% to almost 20%, was really substantial.

David Roberts

Could you look closely enough into those policies to see whether the main metric is just price? I mean, sort of like efficacy goes up with price, or is it more complicated than that? Because I know London has increased its charge a couple of times, hasn't it?

Kimberly Nicholas

Yes, it has. I don't have an answer to say, "for every dollar a city charges, it drops by this amount." I mean, London's, I think, partly reflected inflation since it was first put in place in 2003 at £5 per day, and then it's now at £15. So I guess that's faster than inflation. But it probably does need to go up over time to remain effective in reducing car use. But we also know that once people change habits, they get stuck in new habits. So if this drives people, no pun intended, if the congestion charge drives people out of their cars, or to do remote work, or to drive less, or to carpool, or to switch to public transport, those new behaviors can become a habit.

And maybe the increase in charge is maybe more relevant in affecting the behavior of potential new drivers.

David Roberts

Right. And it's also important to mention that revenue goes toward public transportation. Has there been — I'm wondering whether London voters are able to sort of see with their eyeballs a notable improvement in public transport that can be traced to this policy?

Kimberly Nicholas

That's a really critical element of policy design, and we found that in the most effective policies, they need to combine carrots and sticks. So you need to have something that explicitly reduces or restricts cars and parking. That's the stick. And you also need to have something that aims to increase and improve and expand the alternative. So public transport, active walking, and biking.

David Roberts

Right.

Kimberly Nicholas

A lot of people on Twitter were looking at my table that lists interventions by a congestion charge or parking and traffic control, and they're like, "you forgot bike lanes." I'm like, "no, look in the carrots column. Bike lanes are there." But just adding bike lanes alone without changing the playing field, that right now really overwhelmingly favors cars and driving, is not enough to shift behavior.

David Roberts

Right. And I imagine that effect is both just in terms of efficacy, but also in terms of political economy. You need to sort of sell some sweet with the sour or whatever, or however it goes.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yes, exactly. I mean, I think a common theme in getting climate policy enacted is you can expect resistance from a small, probably powerful group of people who benefit from the current status quo. So I wasn't there in London studying this 15 years ago when the first congestion charge was adopted, but I'm sure it was not a completely smooth ride.

And I think politicians need to get much more bold about defending these climate policies on their social merits of saying, "look, here's the data. In the UK, it's overwhelmingly the richest households that have a car. Almost 40% of the lowest-income households don't have a car. And those are more likely to be BIPOC communities. Those are women and single head-of-household. So if we care about equality, we actually need to have some restrict over consumption as well as increase the standards for people at the lowest end."

Number two drum roll, please. Thank you. It's parking and traffic control. So that means removing parking spaces.

David Roberts

Oh, my God. Removing parking spaces? What? I just broke out into a sweat.

Kimberly Nicholas

I said it. You mean like a fevered fantasy of delight?

David Roberts

Well, a little both, and terror at the thought of proposing this in the US city.

Kimberly Nicholas

It can happen. It can happen, Dave. You can do it. That's the stick, then, in this case. So that's not an economic stick. The first one was an economic stick of a monetary charge, but this one is a public goods and services stick, basically, of reallocating the space in a city, the public space, to be of higher use to people than cars. And so alongside that restriction, and basically the carrot is, you make those spaces really beautiful and usable, and you put bike lanes and walkways in and add car-free streets. And then people use that space and benefit from that space in a different way, and that creates popularity.

And I know that US cities, as well as many other cities, have done this, for example, with the pop-up bike lanes and bike lane expansions starting during the Pandemic, for example.

David Roberts

I find that whole episode, you address that actually in your post, and we might as well talk about it here because I find it somewhat disheartening. There was a lot of sort of pop-up urbanism during the Pandemic, with a lot of new bike lanes and other walkable streets that excluded cars. And as I look around, I'm not sure how much of it is sticking. It looks like a lot of it is getting rolled back. Do you have a sense of that?

Kimberly Nicholas

You're probably right. I haven't seen a study. We know that in the Pandemic, public policy did not seize the moment as it should have.

David Roberts

On a number of levels.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yeah, yes, absolutely. I'm not an expert on the health level, but on the climate level, only 18% globally of the COVID funds were in line with climate goals, basically. So there could have been a huge opportunity there to tackle some of these systemic problems, that was largely missed, unfortunately. But we know that those moments of disruption are an effective moment to change behavior, that habits form in a context, and when the context changes, "so okay, I'm not going into the office anymore." People do develop new routines and habits. So smart city planning would have kind of seized that and capitalized on that more.

And some cities did do that. So European cities that added bike lanes during the Pandemic increased cycling rates by eleven to 48%. So it was a really big increase. But now, as you said, we are seeing some rollback of those initiatives. I don't have a number overall for how much, but I mean, at least anecdotally some cities are returning. And I guess what this tells us is carrots alone are not enough. You need policy change that actually focuses on the source of the problem. So I mean, if we're talking about fossil fuels, it's production and supply. If we're talking about transport, it's restricting cars and parking.

David Roberts

Yes. And so then number three is one of my favorites. Let's talk about number three.

Kimberly Nicholas

Alright. Number three is the "limited traffic zone". So that's excluding cars from parts of the city, with exceptions for residents. And I should say we haven't talked about this yet, but I mean, all of this can and should be designed to make sure that people who need cars, for mobility and social inclusion, have access to them. And that's the really important part of reducing the inequalities, that for disability or other reasons for people who actually need cars, that should be possible. So certainly those folks would get an exception. But in a limited traffic zone, cars are excluded from a certain region.

And again, the care that's linked to that stick is that violation fines fund public transport.

David Roberts

And is usually the city center, isn't it? I mean, that's usually where these things start.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yes, we just looked at cities again because we wanted to have something that was hopefully useful for this EU mission to deliver these 100 climate-neutral cities. But there are also ways of reducing car use in rural areas. And that wasn't the focus of our study here. But I think that's a really interesting area because, much like the misconception you mentioned that. "wait a minute, the poor are really car-dependent, and we can't punish them. Well, wait a minute, that's not what the data show." Similarly, people have the argument that rural people are more car-dependent, and at least in Sweden, the data show that that's not the case.

That they may have fewer alternatives for public transit, for example, but they don't drive more on average, or they don't drive further than people in cities or suburbs. So in Sweden, and I think this is repeated elsewhere, it's a small minority of folks who do a really excessive amount of driving. It's 25% of the population here that cause 90% of the car emissions. So it's targeting those folks. And those folks are largely the highest income. And then they're distributed around, geographically, between the countryside and the city pretty evenly.

David Roberts

So who are the sort of marquee cities here? London did this, didn't it? And didn't Paris also do this?

Kimberly Nicholas

Limited traffic zones. The example we talked about was Rome, and they saw a 20% reduction in cars during the hours that this restriction was in place. And even when it wasn't, they saw half of that 10% reduction. So it shows that having policy change does lead to pretty widespread and more lasting behavior and social change, rather than it's not only like a light switch that people just only follow when it's on. It starts to shift norms and create alternatives and do other good things.

David Roberts

Yeah, seems like a huge piece of this is how to take those changing habits and sort of reinforce them and accelerate them and make sure they don't roll back.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yeah, that's true. I mean, there you start to get into some of our other policies that we identified as effective, which have to do with, for example, workplaces and schools, because then I think the employers and schools and cities can do a lot to promote new norms. I mean, to make to have the infrastructure to shower at work, for example, or secure bike parking, but also to kind of make it easy and accepted and even expected to cycle to work. And I know that was in the news recently of some dismissive comments about, "oh, people in Denmark are so poor that they have to cycle to work."

David Roberts

And it was like the most American thing I've ever seen in my entire life.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yeah, "no, they actually are doing fine financially, and they prefer to cycle." And here's a minister in a suit on a bike, and it's just the best way to get to work, and it's not a hardship.

David Roberts

And I think of also all those videos I'm always seeing of bicycle school buses in Barcelona. Are you familiar with this? Just like huge herds of children on bikes that all ride together for sort of safety. And it also seems like the social part of it too is a big part of habit formation. Just having it be socially accepted and having your peers doing it too and being able to do it together.

Kimberly Nicholas

Absolutely. I mean, my friend David Kroodsma biked from grad school at Stanford to the tip of Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of South America. And he had an amazing journey. It was raising awareness about climate. He met so many people, and people would invite him to stay in their homes, and he slept in a lot of fire stations. And I mean, he wrote a book, had an amazing time. And he told me that he also did something similar across the US, and he could never meet people because there are never people on the street.

David Roberts

There are just no people on the street. I really don't think Americans realize the lack. Because you kind of have to travel overseas, and you just get used to like, "I'm in a city, of course, there are people around."

Kimberly Nicholas

Yes. That's so much better for us as humans. And in terms of social cohesion and trust, which is really important for democracy, and knowing a diverse group of people, and getting to know your neighbors, and actually having small interactions with others in the real world. I mean, the cars are so isolating, and David said he would have to go to gas stations or grocery stores, was like the only moment he could grab people out of their cars.

David Roberts

Just hang out outside McDonald's. Speaking of trust, one of the themes you sort of pull out of this study is how well-placed local governments are to do this kind of stuff. So talk about that a little bit.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yeah. So we found that the policies that worked did a couple of things. They needed to combine carrots and sticks, as we've been discussing, so that could be economic or city planning as tools to make it more expensive, or difficult to drive cars and park, and make it easier and cheaper to walk and bike and take transit. There's also information campaigns that can be a part of that. And then who is it that can do all these good things? Well, 75% of the measures in our study were led by local governments.

David Roberts

What were the remaining 25%? Where did they come from?

Kimberly Nicholas

I mean, most of these interventions had more than one partner involved. A couple of them were led by the transit agencies, sub-NGOs, a couple of businesses, and those kind of players were also usually involved in partnership with the local government.

David Roberts

Right.

Kimberly Nicholas

But I think what it says to me is that local government can and should be leading these initiatives and should be making the case for them, building the political will that we always talk about. But in really practical ways, saying, "Okay, who can do what, and who do I need on board to do this?" And it's not only politicians and elected officials, but I think civil servants have a huge role to play here. I mean, people who are working in transport, and streets, and planning departments are really important in making cities better for people.

David Roberts

You said you went through 800 studies, so I'm sure you've looked at programs in a lot of different cities. Was there any particular city or any particular program that you had sort of not appreciated before that jumped out of you, that sort of caught your imagination?

Kimberly Nicholas

One that kind of surprised me was car sharing. So the two cities that have adopted that and that we found had measured its impact, had good reports. So they found that they replaced 12 to 15 private cars with each shared car. And that was, like, a carrot-only policy. So that's having integrated into neighborhoods, nearby where people live and work, having cars that you can check out with an app, for example, just for an hour or two, as opposed to a more sort of centralized rental system.

David Roberts

Right.

Kimberly Nicholas

But the thing that surprised me there, the question that was raised in other literature, is there is a risk of that seamless and easy use of cars drawing in more people who previously were not driving. So, I mean, it's clearly a win for the space issue, which we were discussing earlier, that cars need a lot of public space to move around and park, and 95% of the time they're sitting still, which is really inefficient. So it helps with some of those issues. But I think the jury is still out on how effective in the real world are they at actually reducing miles traveled and the number of people traveling by car.

David Roberts

Right. And may this is a good time to mention that the other thing people refer to as car sharing, which is sort of car services Uber and Lyft and all that, as far as I can tell, the recent studies I've seen show that they probably increase vehicle miles traveled in cities, all told.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yes.

David Roberts

Which is a bit of a sad trumpet ending for that much-hyped trend.

Kimberly Nicholas

It's the same with E-scooters. There was just a study in Switzerland, that there's a lot of hype and probably a lot of very good intentions, I think, in these kind of micro-mobility and shared mobility. But as you said in the US, there was a really comprehensive study that found that Uber and Lyft entering a market, increased vehicle ownership in the city overall and also eroded took away from public transport use for the high-income areas. So it's the opposite of the carrot and the stick. Both things are going in the wrong direction.

David Roberts

Bummer.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yeah.

David Roberts

Let's talk a little bit if you have anything to say about it, about how or whether this sort of analysis can be ported to the US. Because I'm looking at your policies and not only just sort of on politically do they seem challenging in a US context, but also a lot of them are sort of premised on shifting people out of cars and into public transit. And a lot of US cities just don't have the public transit to absorb a very large shift. So is there any plans for a similar study like this in the US.

Or how applicable do you think this is to the US?

Kimberly Nicholas

Well, I'm not planning to do one at the moment, so if anyone listening wants to, please go for it and feel free to contact me if you want some advice.

David Roberts

You can find enough policies to study.

Kimberly Nicholas

Well, I think. They're out there. And actually, I will answer your question, but something that doing this study made me realize is that there's a huge research need for really applied research like this, that is not scientifically groundbreaking, to compare apples and oranges and sift through these large number of studies. But it's actually really important that we have this evidence base. And this is one of the studies that I've done that I've gotten the most feedback from citizens, from people, from city planners, actually, around the world, saying, "I can use this in my work."

David Roberts

Yeah, there's a lot of will out there to do this now, I feel like, recently.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yeah, and for a lot of different reasons. We do need people who like to do the work, to make the work accessible. Please measure miles traveled, as I said, and then put it online, I mean, get it out there and share it. And somebody needs to compile it because we need this evidence base to help push forward good climate policy. But okay, that was my hobby horse. Now, I forgot your original question. Oh, "can we do it in the US?"

David Roberts

Well, just how depressed should we be about the US putting any of this into effect?

Kimberly Nicholas

Well, I know that things are tough in the US right now, but I will say there's so much potential, actually. And I really see cities as leaders in reducing emissions, and actually making a fast and fair transition to a fossil-free world happen, because cities, we have about ten times more cities globally that actually are on track and reducing emissions than we have countries. There's about 20 countries that are reducing emissions, where they're going down, which is the right direction. All of them need to speed up and do much more. But they've started that transition. But we have over 300 cities that are actually decreasing emissions.

And I think that cities are a really effective place to engage in climate work. And that's good news for citizens as well, because it's easier to get involved as a citizen at the city level, to show up at city council meetings, to organize your neighborhood. I mean, those things actually do really work.

David Roberts

Yeah. You don't get into politics in the paper, but it strikes me as this just such a straightforward reflection of politics, and the sort of sorting of political tribes into and out of cities. So all the willing people have been sorted into cities, which does make them fertile places to do this. Did you, in the process of looking through all these papers, learn anything about the politics? Because, of course, when you rank things by how effective they are, I'm sure there are policies we could think of that would be way more effective than any of these, but couldn't get past anywhere.

Was there a political economy sort of aspect to this study or your other work?

Kimberly Nicholas

Not in this study in particular, but it is something that I think about a lot because the only way for climate policies to reduce emissions is to actually be enacted and enforced. So we have to think about feasibility. My friend and colleague Christian Nielsen is doing some of this work on, basically, including in models and in the way that traditionally the people. For example, in the IPCC, the Climate Panel, have been assembling and ranking policies to start to include not just technical effectiveness, but actual behavioral plasticity. So how willing are people to actually use and adopt these things and the political feasibility? How do we get legitimacy and actually get these policies enacted?

So I can just say, I know these are very important issues, and I don't have insight, because of the way we did this study, to how did these cities succeed in getting them passed. But that could be a next step to now that we know where these cities are that actually worked. We could contact these folks, we could interview them, and try to scale it up. And I know that some journalists have actually, or at least one journalist contacted me and was planning to do that, to try and find the people in these cities who actually did this work. So now that we know where the bright spots are, we can dive into that further.

David Roberts

One sort of parallel that struck me, as I was thinking about this, is discussions over carbon taxes. I think the conventional wisdom at this point is, "yes, in theory, a carbon tax is the most effective sort of per ton per dollar policy, but it also happens to be the most politically challenging policy." You're going to face the most resistance from the most people if you push it. So in that sense, it's not effective because it's very difficult to pass. And I just wonder about whether congestion charges are a little bit like that. Obviously, efficacious if you can do it, but so difficult to do that it might be worth doing other things instead, or alongside, or, you know what I mean?

Kimberly Nicholas

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's smart to think about in a local context. I mean, the other cities that passed congestion charges after London, I actually don't know enough about the process that London went through. Their mayor, I know, was instrumental, but I don't know exactly how that policy got put in place. But the other three that have it had a referendum, so people voted on it. That's obviously a good way in a democracy, to demonstrate legitimacy. This is the will of the people. But I totally agree, if in your context a congestion charge is just the kiss of death, then if you combine workplace parking charges and workplace travel planning with mobility services for university and school travel planning, you could maybe get just as far.

Yeah, when we did the study. So we ranked these interventions by effectiveness, and then another part of the study was to apply it to the city of Lund, which is where I live and where Paula Kuss was doing her masters. And I have a project trying to help Lund actually reach its climate goals and be climate neutral by 2030. We have a long way to go, but in our case, for example, we didn't recommend the congestion charge to Lund because we did do some of that political feasibility work on the ground here. And from interviewing local experts and civil servants and politicians, it wasn't ranked feasible.

David Roberts

Oh, interesting.

Kimberly Nicholas

We chose the three that were the most, that combined the best combination of feasibility and effectiveness, and everyone was like, "oh, apps, we should do an app." And we're like, "nope, that's not that effective." So even if it's very feasible, we're not going to suggest that.

David Roberts

People love their apps.

Kimberly Nicholas

They really do.

David Roberts

Yeah. I wonder ... this is sort of a random thought, and it's probably not going to be captured in your study because it's about policies that have been in place for a while ... but I wonder how big the working from home trend is. Are you aware of any studies yet on the working from-home effect on reducing cars, and what, and whether there — I've been wondering if there are cities should be embracing that and passing policies to sort of try and reinforce it and keep it in place, or if you have any thoughts on that at all.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yes, I haven't seen a study about exactly that from the Pandemic. But from earlier work, in 2018, Seth Wines led a study where we compiled existing interventions across high-impact domains. So driving, meat consumption, energy use at home. We wanted to do flying at that reduction. At that time, we found zero cities that had even tried to reduce flying, so we couldn't include that. But the ones that we found that reduced the most CO2 were telecommuting. So incentives to do that can be really effective.

There's a newer study from the UK, I linked to it in that post in The Conversation. That study is called "Do Teleworkers Travel Less?" And that's based in England. And they basically conclude, "you need to work from home three or more days per week to actually reduce your overall driving." That there seems to be some substitution effect of perhaps more leisure travel or people. I think a big risk is people moving further away from work because they don't have to be there so often.

David Roberts

Right.

Kimberly Nicholas

But we know that most emissions come from long-distance driving. So if you're only driving to work once a week, but it's 100 miles instead of you used to drive every day, 3 miles, that's a worse equation for climate.

David Roberts

Interesting. Yeah. And this is another area where it just seems like the difference between the EU and the US is so huge, because working from home if you are living in a city, you have other reasons to go out and mingle with people other than work. But if working from home just means being stranded in your suburb all day, every day, just seems like a different thing in terms of driving and just in terms of life quality.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yeah, I hear you.

David Roberts

Final question, and you touched on this earlier, but another thing I think about the US is how car dependent our rural areas are. I think probably considerably more so than in the EU, or in a place like Sweden. My experience of the rural US is highways, two-lane highways with roads branching off them. And even in little, small towns, you pass through, like in the South, where I grew up, even tiny towns are built such that you basically have to drive everywhere, such as to be hostile to walking. So I just wonder whether you've heard about policies for reducing vehicle miles traveled in rural, or even like exurban, suburban and exurban, and rural areas, because in a sense it's easiest to do in a city, I would think.

But have you heard about efforts to do it in the more far-flung and less dense areas?

Kimberly Nicholas

Yes, I have and I heard about it from readers who contacted me and discussed on Twitter and in my newsletter. So I think in my newsletter that I wrote about this, which was "We Can Fix It", a couple of months ago, I think I linked to the study that someone brought to my attention. So it was a report from the UK that was specifically about reducing driving and increasing sustainable mobility in villages and rural areas. So there are people thinking about that. And I do think that's really important, both for social inclusion and cohesion. That the dynamic, in many parts of the world, is this urban, rural divide, and people who live in the countryside feel like, "those big city politicians don't understand me, they don't see me, they don't care about me."

And that's not good for democracy. So I think meeting people's needs where they are is really important. But I guess another thing to say there is that if we go back to this "avoid-shift-improve" model, the most effective way is to avoid the need for mobility in the first place, to have your needs close to hand. So, I mean, there's never going to be a sustainable way to travel 50 or 100 miles between where you live and where you work. That's just too far away. And I used to be one of those people. When I lived in California, I was commuting 70 miles from my home in Sonoma to grad school at Stanford, and it was a nightmare and now feels like completely ridiculous.

But I did that for many years, so I know there are lots of reasons that people get put in those positions, and those are the things we also need to be thinking about structurally. I mean, how do we make towns attractive places to live that have jobs, so people don't have to commute? Or how do we make it affordable to live where the jobs are? And that was a policy that, I think, got mentioned briefly, that something workplaces can do is actually support policies for affordable housing and encourage people to live near work and incentivize that, rather than giving free parking and incentivizing people to live further away.

David Roberts

Well, this is also Interesting, and it strikes me as promising that you got such an enormous amount of feedback about it.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yeah, thanks.

David Roberts

It seems like the iron is hot, or whatever the right metaphor is. Like, People seem geared up to do this now.

Kimberly Nicholas

I think so. And that feels really exciting. And I mean, I think we need a lot more work in this direction. Imagine we lived in a world where politicians are ready to implement bold climate policies. What is it they should do? We really need better answers to those questions in specific places and for specific sectors. And "who can do what" is where I'm now shifting my research to because we do have a lot of ideas from many, many years of study of — we know in broad strokes what needs to be done.

Transition off fossil fuels, have agriculture that feeds people without destroying the planet. Big Picture. We've got all that. We have a lot of technical solutions, but "who can do what" in specific places to actually make that happen in a fast and fair way, we really need more evidence base for. So I think this is the way I'm going in the future, and I hope others will be inspired to contribute, too.

David Roberts

Awesome. Well, thanks for doing the work, and thanks for coming on.

Kimberly Nicholas

Thanks for having me, Dave.

David Roberts

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